Main menu

Monthly Archives: November 2012

Smartphone penetration in EU5 (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and UK) is now at 53.7% with nearly 130 million people using smartphones in the three month average ending September 2012. Out of this smartphone audience, 15.5% also own a tablet, compared to only 9.3% last year. This 6.2 percentage point increase demonstrates the rapid growth of tablet adoption across Europe.

Looking at each of the EU5 countries, the UK is leading the way with 17.7% of their smartphone audience also owning a tablet, followed closely by Spain with 16.9%. Italy and France are on par with 15.1% tablet penetration among smartphone users, but Germany falls behind the EU5 average with only 12.8% of the smartphone audience owning tablets.

Share on:

Like this:

The calendar year wouldn’t be complete without a few social media fails.

In 2012, plenty of big brands and organizations suffered serious backlashes on social networks like Twitter andFacebook for offensive tweets, questionable ad campaigns or controversial company statements. Some, like McDonald’s, attempted good-natured social media campaigns that simply took unexpected turns. Others, like StubHub’s and KitchenAid’s Twitter accounts mistakenly send out shocking tweets.

If there’s one lesson to take away from this year’s fails, it’s that brands need to be particularly careful when it comes to tying a promotion or post to a big, public event. Several of the businesses on our list were heavily criticized for posts relating to the presidential election and Hurricane Sandy, for example.

Back in January, McDonald’s tried to promote its brand and engage with customers through two promoted trends: #meetthefarmers and #mcdstories.

Unfortunately for McDonald’s, many Twitter users decided to post their horror stories at the fast food chain using the second of those hashtags. In essence, McDonald’s paid to promote a trend that showered the company in bad publicity. McDonald’s later admitted that “#mcdstories did not go as planned.”

Early this year, Snickers paid several celebs in the UK to tweet pictures of themselves eating Snickers bars.

The ad campaign didn’t sit well with the UK’s Office of Fair Trading, which requires companies to explicitly spell out when a product is being endorsed. The OFT launched an investigation into the Twitter ads, but eventually cleared Snickers of wrongdoing.

Talk about bad timing. American Rifleman, a journal affiliated with the National Rifle Association, posted a pro-gun tweet as the mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo. was unfolding.

The tweet itself appeared to have been pre-scheduled through Hootsuite, but needless to say, it struck a nerve. The tweet was deleted several hours later and the account was deleted later that day, as well.

The NRA wasn’t the only organization to ignite a firestorm on Twitter following the Aurora shooting. CelebBoutique, an online store, posted a promotional tweet with the Aurora hashtag to take advantage of a trending topic. Unfortunately, the company’s PR apparently did not take the time to read up on why Aurora was trending, so the tweet came off as incredibly insensitive.

Chick-Fil-A endured two back-to-back social media controversies in the middle of 2012. The first and arguably more serious of the two emerged after the company’s founder spoke out firmly against same-sex marriage. Critics blasted Chick-Fil-A on various social networks, and the company’s Facebook page was briefly taken over by posts that had nothing to do with chicken.

Shortly afterwards, Chick-Fil-A was accused of creating a fake Facebook account to come to the company’s defense. This time, it pertained to a related controversy: whether a particular Chick-Fil-A location had recalled Jim Hensen’s Creature Shop Puppet toys after Hensen’s organization came out against Chick-Fil-A’s stance on gay marriage. Chick-Fil-A later denied that it created the account.

Microsoft briefly got political in September, when one of the people who manages its Twitter account dissed conservative talking head Ann Coulter from the Microsoft account, rather than from his personal account. Microsoft replied to a tweet from former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich with the following post: “@RBReich your granddaughter’s level of discourse and policy > those of Ann Coulter.” Ouch.

When it comes to offensive tweets, KitchenAid takes the cake. After President Obama mentioned his grandmother during the first presidential debate in October, the kitchen appliance manufacturer responded by posting the following tweet to its 24,000 followers: “Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! She died 3 days b4 he became president. #nbcpolitics”

To the company’s credit, it quickly removed the tweet and issued an apology, explaining that a member of the KitchenAid team had mistakenly posted it from the company account instead of from a personal handle.

Shortly after the KitchenAid incident, StubHub had its own social media snafu. Someone posted a vulgar tweet from StubHub’s account, calling the ticket sales website a “stubsucking hell hole.” The tweet was up for about an hour before the company finally deleted it and issued an apology. It’s unclear whether the tweet came from an unhappy StubHub employee or if the account was hacked.

Word to the wise: Think twice before you try to turn a natural disaster into a promotional opportunity. American Apparel offered 20% off for those in states affected by Hurricane Sandy, in case they were “bored” by the storm. Customers quickly took to Twitter and other social networks to criticize the ad.

American Apparel wasn’t the only retailer to frustrate those affected by Hurricane Sandy. As the storm made its way up the East Coast, The Gap seemed to encourage those hunkering down for the storm to do some online shopping. The company eventually took down the tweet and offered a semi-apology.

Earlier this month, Macy’s was pressured to drop spokesman Donald Trump after Trump’s publicity stunt, in which he offered to donate $5 million in exchange for President Obama’s college records and passport application.

More than half a million people signed an online petition asking Macy’s to sever its relationship with Trump, and the retailer’s Facebook and Twitter pages were bombarded with anti-Trump comments.

Share on:

Like this:

When it comes to devices, kids’ holiday wish lists are simple this year. The most-wanted gifts are predominantly from one company—Apple. According to a recent Nielsen study, Apple’s popularity leading up to the holiday season continues a trend seen over the last couple of years, with American kids aged 6-12 generally more interested in the latest iOS offerings than other consumer electronics and gaming devices.

Approximately half the children surveyed expressed interest in the full-sized iPad (up from 44% last year), and 36 percent in the new iPad Mini. The iPod Touch and iPhone are also coveted devices among these young consumers (36% and 33%, respectively). Kids are also likely to ask for dedicated gaming hardware this holiday, with 39 percent excited to own Nintendo’s just-released console offering, Wii U, and 29 percent indicating they want a device from that company’s portable DS family. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 also proved appealing, with approximately one-quarter of kids 6-12 saying they want these high definition consoles.

Among consumers aged 13 and older, tablets and full-sized computers were the top electronics choices, with roughly one in five indicating they want to acquire the iPad (vs. 24% last year), any other tablet, or a computer. Reinforcing the notion that the tablet market is one to watch, non-Apple devices—lead by Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Samsung Galaxy offerings—proved nearly as desirable as the iPad among teens and adults, while e-readers showed a slight decline in interest from 2011. Consumers 13 years and older were also interested in purchasing the Wii U, the iPhone and Internet-enabled TVs.

With discretionary dollars and heavy competition across gift categories, these study results suggest that consumer electronics and gaming devices should be an exciting sector to watch this holiday shopping season.

Share on:

Like this:

One way to measure how well a website is doing is by the number of pageviews it’s gotten. Another still — and the au courant metric of a website’s success — is unique visitors, because it reveals how many people are actually going there. But what if you looked at what visitors were doing with stories after reading them? That’s what Newswhip has done to compile a list of its “social monster” websites — the sites that are killing it on Facebook. And the mix might surprise you.

What you’re looking at is a chart showing the publishers with the greatest number of stories that have over 100 Facebook interactions in the month of September, as measured on October 1. A “Facebook interaction” is defined as basically any kind of thing you can do with a link on Facebook — a like, a comment, or a share. The data was collected by Newswhip, which tracks over 5,000 English language newspapers and pulls the likes, shares and comments for their stories from Facebook’s open API. So, to translate, the Huffington Post had 2,531 stories last month that got at least 100 people to like, share or comment on it on Facebook.

There basically two ways you could be surprised by this chart, simply by looking at the top 10: If you have a more net-centric view of the world, it’s perhaps jarring to see that seven out of the top 10 are essentially old media properties, like the New York Times, Daily Mail and BBC (though maybe it shouldn’t be). On the other hand, it’s possibly just as surprising that theHuffington Post and BuzzFeed, sites founded in 2005 and 2006 respectively, have so quickly infiltrated the same ranks as super established properties. (And that, well, the Huffington Post carries such a commanding lead over everybody else, with nearly a third more super social stories than the runner up, the UK’s Daily Mail.)

There are obviously limitations to examining only Facebook interactions as a method for determining the most social stories and websites — it doesn’t include Twitter, Tumblr or Pinterest sharing, and it misses some of the dark social sharing proposed by Alexis Madrigal (though presumably it catchesanything shared in Facebook chat, which appears to make up a not-significant portion of dark social traffic). But of the social traffic that we can see, Facebook still makes up the single biggest chunk of it for news sites, so the data collected here is significant at least insofar as it’s telling us, broadly speaking, what people are sharing publicly — and which sites are creating more of that stuff than anybody else.

Here’s another look at that data, from a different perspective: The sites with the greatest total number of Facebook interactions. It mixes up the chart quite a bit: the New York Times moves to number three, and BuzzFeed moves to number four. The Huffington Post still destroys everybody else.

(A note and an update: Newswhip explains its data here, noting that its “content finding systems are (and will remain) a work in progress,” leading to it not counting Slate‘s blogs, which led to a lower ranking for the site. The Daily Beastdisputs its Newswhip rank, which was below the top 40. Another particular point is that the Wall Street Journal and other sites behind a paywall present challenges to accurate tracking.

The tool that generated this data, Newswhip’s Spike is in open beta right now and free.